As a growing research field, digital humanities (DH) is receiving increasing attention from quantitative science studies using standardized scholarly databases. However, one of the challenges of this new line of research is how to select the query strategy to produce a representative sample of the field. In this research, we analyzed the differences between two publication samples acquired from the Dimensions database using two sampling approaches, namely, a keyword search and a DH journal list. We argue that these two samples offer distinct perspectives on the conceptual landscape of digital humanities, namely, implicit DH and explicit DH , and contribute to building a more comprehensive representation of the DH research domain. We identified notable differences between the publication samples from these two query strategies, especially the fact that these two samples have a very small overlap of publications, and they also have different disciplinary orientations. Our findings indicate that future quantitative studies analyzing DH publications should use more inclusive methods to cover both the implicit and explicit types of DH contributions. Moreover, we also discussed how our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the disciplinary composition of DH, an interdisciplinary research field.

Research instruments play significant roles in the construction of scientific knowledge, even though we have only acquired very limited knowledge about their life cycles from quantitative studies. This paper aims to address this gap by quantitatively examining the citation contexts of an exemplary research instrument, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM ), in full-text psychological publications. We investigated the relationship between the citation contexts of the DSM and its status as a valid instrument being used and described by psychological researchers. We specifically focused on how this relationship has changed over the DSM ’s citation histories, especially through the temporal framework of its versions. We found that a new version of the DSM is increasingly regarded as a valid instrument after its publication; this is reflected in various key citation contexts, such as the use of hedges, attention markers, and the verb profile in sentences where the DSM is cited. We call this process the reinstrumentalization of the DSM in the space of scientific publications. Our findings bridge an important gap between quantitative and qualitative science studies and shed light on an aspect of the social process of scientific instrument development that is not addressed by the current qualitative literature.

Citation sentiment plays an important role in citation analysis and scholarly communication research, but prior citation sentiment studies have used small data sets and relied largely on manual annotation. This paper uses a large data set of PubMed Central (PMC) full-text publications and analyzes citation sentiment in more than 32 million citances within PMC, revealing citation sentiment patterns at the journal and discipline levels. This paper finds a weak relationship between a journal’s citation impact (as measured by CiteScore) and the average sentiment score of citances to its publications. When journals are aggregated into quartiles based on citation impact, we find that journals in higher quartiles are cited more favorably than those in the lower quartiles. Further, social science journals are found to be cited with higher sentiment, followed by engineering and natural science and biomedical journals, respectively. This result may be attributed to disciplinary discourse patterns in which social science researchers tend to use more subjective terms to describe others’ work than do natural science or biomedical researchers.